One Seattle man will loathe the sight today of Christine Gregoire taking the oath of office. He vows to keep fighting the controversial and contested gubernatorial election, one Web log blast at a time.

He is 41, holds a master's degree in computer science from Stanford University and was a longtime Democrat before switching primary colors.

He rarely agrees with my columns and volunteers this information with a bluntness found in his online political posts.

He is a family man turned right-leaning gadfly. And the important questions he keeps raising -- about the number of valid ballots and dead voters, for example -- have kept a lens focused on flaws in Washington's electoral machine.

Meet Stefan Sharkansky -- "The Shark."

His efforts show how one small blog -- a Web log site with updated entries -- can deliver quite a sharp bite.

I was interested in knowing more about Sharkansky because if a new election is ordered, he just might be remembered as the guy who made a huge difference.

Sharkansky is the main mind and mover behind Sound Politics (www.soundpolitics.com), a Web site he started in July as a moderate-to-conservative alternative to the mainstream media in Seattle.

Before Election Day, the site registered 200 to 300 visits a day.

Now, traffic is up to a whopping 19,000 daily visits.

The spike can be attributed to Sharkansky and his fellow bloggers, citizen crusaders whose scoops, musings and blusters have journalists around town rushing to play catch-up.

Sharkansky deserves credit for The Blog That Launched a Thousand Hits. (And just as many fits.)

In a Dec. 29 post, he said King County had about 3,000 more votes than there were actual voters on preliminary voting lists.

Dino Rossi, the GOP candidate for governor, seized on that revelation.

Reporters scrambled.

County election officials hurried to explain the discrepancy. They said the gap might stem from people such as abused women whose names do not appear on public lists in order to protect their safety.

Election officials last week pared the number to 1,217 more votes than people on lists -- a degree of accuracy the county said it would not lose sleep over. But Sharkansky discovered the figure was erroneous -- the real number, later acknowledged by the county, was about 1,800, he said -- and posted that number on Sound Politics, ahead of the competition. Again.

On the site, Sharkansky recently accused county election officials of maintaining a Mafia-like "omerta," a code of silence. He writes: "My friendly invitation to potential whistle-blowers at the King County Elections Department: If you're aware of any wrongdoing, come forward."

Sharkansky has stayed back, out of the spotlight, a blogger without a public face.

I dropped by the county elections office the other day to look for people so passionate about politics they would fork out $30 for a data disk of voting lists. The idea proved to be a bust.

I came across only two citizens, including one who wore an Orcas Island baseball cap, a brown leather jacket and khakis.

He inconspicuously slipped past reporters waiting for the disks to buy his own. He was about to slip away when I offered a handshake.

The Shark shook my hand and offered a smile.

Sharkansky, it turns out, is of pleasant comportment in person, hardly sharklike. He exudes a professorial mien.

"I feel like I'm doing a civic duty," he said softly before heading home to crunch the data on his computer. "I want to expose errors, abuses. ... I'm glad to do my small part to shine light on a part of government that is not working as effectively as it could."

He believes democracy is not based on elections so much as the will of the people. Elections are just a tool to measure that will. But if the tool is faulty, he says, it must be fixed or replaced.

At one time he was a registered Democrat in California. Then, Gov. Gray Davis got on the scene, prompting Sharkansky to flee for the GOP before the 2002 California gubernatorial race -- the last election that Davis, a Democrat, won before the voters recalled him.

Sharkansky felt Davis was inept. He also believed President Bush's response to the Sept. 11 attacks "was better than what could have been expected from a Democratic president" -- a debatable point.

In any case, Sharkansky, who started a blog in San Francisco 2 1/2 years ago, kept up his Web ways after relocating to Seattle in 2003 and settling in the Green Lake neighborhood with his wife, son and stepdaughter.

A software developer by trade, he never envisioned his site would go from being an alternative political forum to a potent postelection force.

Such is the power of blogs.

Yesterday, Gregoire sent out a news release saying, "I especially look forward to the inaugural ball." As her cheery words made the rounds, Sharkansky was blogging away about why the governor-elect should be in no mood to celebrate.